#11 - Emily Kramer

Today's edition is your reminder that more content is not always better. In 2025, it's depth.

Just ask Emily Kramer. She spends 30+ hrs on every ONE newsletter. 51,000 Substack subscribers later, it's working...

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Emily is the co-founder of MKT1 and author of the MKT1 Newsletter.

Over the last 15+ years, she has worked with some of the fastest-growing startups as Head of Marketing, including at Asana and Carta.

She now serves as an advisor and investor to startups through MKT1, helping them build and scale their marketing functions.

The MKT1 Newsletter is her outlet to help other marketers. She shares what she's learned along the way, and provides valuable frameworks for tackling today's most pressing marketing challenges.

One Big Monthly Term Paper

A lot of content best practice today is grounded in discussions of volume:

We have to publish a newsletter at least once a week.

We have to publish on Linkedin once a day.

But Emily takes a very different tact with her newsletter. She spends 30-40 hours per edition, and only publishes one per month.

They are 3,000-5,000 word, well-researched, well-thought-out deep dives into a given topic that Emily's partner jokingly calls "term papers."

"I'm not efficient at newsletter writing. It takes me a really long time, like a really long time. So per monthly post, which are kind of deep dive guides into things, they're like 3,000 to 5,000 words...I spend like 30 to 40 hours per newsletter."

Think about if you spent 30+ hours writingone newsletter at your company.Your CMO would call it irresponsible!

But this is part of Emily's strategy:

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‍1) Create one deep, original, valuable piece of content

‍Make sure it's really valuable. Something that will stand out in a crowded inbox. Emily holds herself to a high quality bar, andrefuses to publish unless her content provides a unique and meaningful perspective.

"I'm a perfectionist about it and I obsess over every detail and I do a lot of research. If I don't have a unique thing to say or a unique point of view, or something I think that I can add to the conversation about whatever topic, I won't write it."

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2)  Repurpose newsletters into shorter content

‍Each newsletter then becomes 5–6 shorter LinkedIn posts.These posts share distinct insights and visuals, all tied back to the newsletter’s main message. This consistent messaging reinforces her thought leadership, and allows her to efficiently create content at higher volumes for social.

"And then most of my LinkedIn content for that entire month is, related to that [newsletter]. These posts are so long that I can usually get like five or six pretty good posts. have like diagrams for five or six things out of this."

The result? 51,000 Substack subscribers, all of whom are raving fans.

Seriously, her readers love the content. Just read these comments.

Starting with Depth

Instead of starting with volume, Emily is starting with depth. 

In today's noisy world, I think this is a lesson that more content marketers and creators need to listen to.

I had this experience myself just last month. I created a big end-of-year analysis that took 40+ hours to complete end-to-end.

It felt like a stupid, irresponsible amount of time, especially at the end of the year with so many deadlines looming. I was exhausted.

But the result? 

The post got 10X more impressions than average and 30X more inbound connection requests and DMs. Put another way, I got more new inbound from that one post than the previous 3 1/2 months of posts combined.

From that perspective, the 40-hour investment is well worth it.

This reminds me of an Alex Hormozi lesson he learned from creators like Mr. Beast:

"You'll notice the bigger the creator, usually the less frequent they actually make videos. And it's because they realize just power laws exist. If you spend 10 times more time on one video, it doesn't get 10 times the views. Sometimes it gets 100 times the views."

There is so much content out there. And supply is only increasing with AI. You now need a much higher quality threshold to break past the noise.

But this presents an opportunity.If you can put in the work to breach the quality threshold, there are asymmetric returns, especially on algorithmic feeds.

So don't start with volume. Start with depth.